Holocaust remembrance in Ukraine: memorialization of the Jewish tragedy at Babi Yar

Abstract

At the core of the debate in Ukraine about Babi Yar lies the Holocaust. Between 1941 and 1943 1.5 million Jews perished in Ukraine, yet a full understanding of that tragedy has been suppressed consistently by ideologies and interpretations of history that minimize or ignore this tragedy. For Soviet ideologues, admitting to the existence of the Holocaust would have been against the tenet of a “Soviet people” and the aggressive strategy of eliminating national and religious identities. A similar logic of oneness is being applied now in the ideological formation of an independent Ukraine. However, rather than one Soviet people, now there is one Ukrainian people under which numerous historical tragedies are being subsumed, and the unique national tragedies of other peoples on the territory of Ukraine, such as the massive destruction of Jews, is again being suppressed. According to this political idea assiduously advocated most recently during the Yushchenko presidency, the twentieth century in Ukraine was a battle for liberation. Within this new, exclusive history, the Holocaust, again, has found no real place. The author reviews the complicated history regarding the memorialization of the Jewish tragedy in Babi Yar through three broad chronological periods: 1943–1960, 1961–1991, and 1992–2009.

Keywords:

• Babi Yar
• Jews in Ukraine
• anti-Semitism
• Holocaust

Notes

The name Babi Yar first appeared in 1401 when the owner baba-shynkarka (old woman-tavern owner) sold her land to a monastery. The ravine (yar) at the bottom of her land was 2.5km long and 50m deep (Evstafeva and Nakhmanovich 66). Babi Yar is the more familiar transliteration from Russian of the name of this ravine; Babyn Yar is the transliteration from Ukrainian.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was a political party established in inter-war Western Ukraine that had individual adherents in Soviet Ukraine, such as poet Olena Teliha and integral nationalist ideologue Dmytro Dontsov. OUN leadership had a history of active cooperation with Nazi Germany through late 1941. Both the Soviet government and the inter-war Polish government of Western Ukraine banned the OUN. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, OUN resumed activities within Ukraine, reorganizing itself there as the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN). After Ukraine's independence, another party using the name OUN, to which Bohdan Chervak belongs, registered in Ukraine. It is not clear if there is any direct link between the post-independence OUN to the inter-war OUN, though the current OUN also adheres to the ideology of integral nationalism.

As Karel C. Berkhoff explains in Harvest of Despair (52), the Nazis executed members of the OUN Melnykite faction in areas outside of Kyiv in November 1941 and February 1942. “The method and location of the executions is unknown, but the bodies probably ended up in Babi Yar.”

To date, there is no reasonably exact figure of how many bodies lay in Babi Yar, including corpses of those who were shot on site, nor of corpses brought to the ravine from elsewhere. The often-cited Soviet figure of 100,000 is cited variously. Shevchenko states 100,000 Jews. Official Soviet histiography did not mention Jews at all. Currently in Ukraine, there is a tendency to delineate the dead of Babi Yar by various categories to prove that the majority of victims were not Jews. Particularly jarring are the undocumented numbers offered in political rhetoric. In his May 2006 directive, Yushchenko did not provide a number for Teliha's comrades-in-arms. By July 2006, the Embassy of Ukraine in the United States claimed 40. Self-proclaimed Ukrainian nationalist Chervak claimed 621. This effort to de-emphasize the number of Jewish dead is linked to the repeated denial that Babi Yar, essentially, was an integral part of the Holocaust of European Jewry.

Press conference, 2 October 1991, Building of the Writer's Union of Ukraine, vul. Ordzhonikidze, Kyiv (author's notes from personal archive).

According to Kiev Entskilopedicheskii Spravochnik (51), a bronze plaque was placed at the Babi Yar monument in 1976 with the (Russian-language) inscription: Советским гражданам и военнопленным солдатам и офицерам Советской Армии, расстрелянным немецкими фашистами в Бабьем Яру, памятник (To Soviet citizens and prisoners of war, soldiers, officers of the Soviet Army shot by German Fascists in Babi Yar, a monument). In 1991, three bronze plaques were placed at the monument with the inscription (left to right) in Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish: "Здесь в 1941–43 годах немецко-фашистскими захватчиками были расстреляны более ста тысяч граждан города Киева и военнопленных" (Here, in 1941–1943, more than one hundred thousand citizens of the city of Kyiv and prisoners of war were shot by German Fascist invaders).

Erenburg and Grossman's Chernaia Kniga [The Black Book], originally released in 1980 in Israel and published for the first time in Ukraine in 1991 (Kyiv: MIP ‘Oberig’), is a different publication from one with a similar title, Le Livre noir du communisme by Stéphane Courtois, published in France 1997 and in an English translation (The Black Book of Communism) in 1999. An extended version of the Erenburg and Grossman book, with three explanatory articles, by Joshua Rubeinstein and Ilya Altman, was published in 2008 as The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-occupied territories (Indiana UP).

Ilia Levitas, Aleksandr Shlaen, Aleksandr Burakovskiy.

The author participated in the debate. See Burakovskiy (“Babii Iar”).

The letter was posted originally at www.rabbinate.org.ua as: Письмо Главного раввина Украины А.Хайкина к руководителям государственных структур по поводу создания заповедника в БЯ, (на имя премъер-министра В.Януковича, министра культуры Ю.Богуцкого, председателя горсовета Л.Черновецкого), Июнь 2007 г.; I consulted the site in June 2007 and printed a copy of the letter. Several months later, when I returned to this site to verify link, the letter had been removed. The Ukrainian government portal that lists the decision regarding Babi Yar to which Rabbi Chaiken reacted can be found at: http://www.kmu.gov.ua/control/ru/publish/article?art_id=69647339&cat_id=1225809. The words Rabbi Chaiken quotes “памяти жертв войны и политических репрессий” are in the first paragraph.

The author was present at the meeting.

For an overview of official positions on anti-Semitism in Ukraine after independence, see Burakovskiy (“Key characteristics”).

Babi Yar, accepted usage, is a transliteration from Russian into English. However, the position of A. Mokhnyk and his political party is to reject Russian usage. In order to maintain the integrity of the text, a political statement, the transliteration from Ukrainian, Babyn Yar, was used.